Order of Debt: Power, Wealth, and Death in the Ottoman Empire, 1700–1830

Sponsor: Harvard History Department

Speaker: Ali Yaycıoğlu, Associate Professor of History, Stanford University

This talk investigates the relationship between property, capital, finance, and Ottoman statehood in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It examines the political and financial actors who shaped the accumulation of wealth and power, tracing public and private debts, networks of obligation, and the making of state order between roughly 1700 and 1830. Drawing on Ottoman fiscal records as well as probate and debt inventories that employ distinctive accounting techniques, the talk shows how postmortem estate settlement became a key site where sovereignty, credit, and coercion intersected. 

Dr. Ali Yaycıoğlu is Associate Professor of History at Stanford University and a historian of the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey whose work examines political economy, law, and state–society relations from the early modern to the modern period. He is the author of Partners of the Empire: Crisis of the Ottoman Order in the Age of Revolutions (2016) and is completing The Order of Debt: Power, Wealth, and Death in the Ottoman Empire. He directs Stanford’s digital history lab Charting the Empire, which develops tools and data for working with Ottoman fiscal codices and distinctive accounting techniques. His essays on democracy, capitalism, and populism in Turkey appear in Uncertain Past Time: Empire, Republic, and Politics (Istanbul, 2024, in Turkish).